HVAC Marketing Budget Calculator
Work Back From the Jobs, Not Forward From Last Year.
Most budgets are last year plus a little. This one starts with how many booked jobs you want, uses your booking rate and what a lead costs you now, and tells you the budget it takes, what those jobs are worth, and what share of revenue that budget represents.
Example numbers loaded. Replace with yours.
Not leads. Jobs on the board.
Share of marketing leads that become jobs.
Blended across your paid and organic channels, all in.
Blended across repair, maintenance, and replacement.
After labor, parts, and equipment. Before overhead.
What you spend today, fee plus ads.
Budget required
How to read it.
Budget required
Jobs you want, divided by booking rate to get leads, times what a lead costs you. Every input is yours, so the output is a plan, not a benchmark.
Share of revenue
The budget as a share of the revenue those jobs produce. Compare it to your margin. If the share is close to the margin, the plan works only on lifetime value.
Same jobs at plus ten points
What the budget would be if booking rate rose ten points first. Almost always cheaper than buying more leads, and the reason we diagnose intake before we scale spend.
What this calculator leaves out.
On purpose, so you know where the number is soft.
- Cost per lead is not flat
- Buying more leads in the same market usually raises the cost of each one. Treat the budget as a floor, not a quote.
- Channel mix
- Organic, paid search, LSA, and Meta cost different amounts per lead and book at different rates. This uses a blend. The audit splits it.
- Capacity
- Eighty booked jobs is only a good goal if you have the trucks and techs to run them. Marketing that books jobs you cannot serve is the most expensive kind.
- Season
- Set the budget by month, not by year. Spend goes where the demand is, and the plan should move every 30 days.
We move budget every 30 days
A budget set in January and left alone is a guess that got promoted. On every account we run, spend moves monthly to whatever is constraining growth right now. Sometimes that is more ads. Often it is the phone, the follow-up, or the board. This calculator is the first version of that conversation.
Henry “Hank Hugh” Hernandez, CEO, HVAC Digital Marketing
HVAC Growth Audit. Free.
Want us to run it on your real records?
A calculator works on what you type in. The Growth Audit works on what your call log and job software actually say, by channel, and shows you which of the seven steps between a search and a booked job is leaking.
- Cost per booked job, by channel, from your own numbers
- The step that is leaking, and how many jobs it costs you
- What it takes to move it, and the next step if you want one
Start here. 2 minutes.
3 questions to start. Your answers stay between us.
Build the budget backwards from jobs.
Percent-of-revenue budgeting answers the wrong question. It tells you what spending is normal, not what your growth target costs. The sturdier method starts at the end: decide how many additional booked jobs you want per month, then work backwards through your close rate and cost per lead to a number that could actually produce them.
Say you want 20 more booked jobs a month. If you book half the leads you get, that is 40 leads; at $75 per lead, the budget is $3,000 a month before management. Now the budget is a forecast you can hold accountable instead of a percentage you hope is right. If the leads arrive and the jobs do not, the problem is intake or sales, not the budget.
Where the money goes matters as much as how much. Demand capture — search, maps, LSA — gets funded first because it harvests homeowners already looking; demand creation gets funded once capture is saturated. Splitting that spend across channels in the right order is most of HVAC advertising channel strategy, and the discipline of judging every channel by cost per booked job runs through the full HVAC marketing stack.
Two cautions. Budgets have minimums: spread $2,000 across five channels and nothing gets enough data to work. And seasonality means the right annual budget is not twelve equal months — load spend ahead of your peaks, when homeowners are about to start searching, not after.
Questions owners ask.
How much should an HVAC company spend on marketing?
Enough to produce the jobs you can serve at a cost per booked job that leaves margin after overhead. That is a different dollar figure and a different share of revenue for every shop, which is why we do not publish a percentage. Work back from the jobs.
Should the budget be a percentage of revenue?
Use the percentage as a check, not a starting point. Start from booked jobs wanted and the rates you actually have. If the resulting share of revenue looks too high, the fix is usually booking rate or cost per lead, not a smaller goal.
What if I do not know my cost per lead?
Total marketing spend last month divided by the leads it produced, from your phone system and forms. If you cannot get that number, that is the first thing the audit fixes, before anyone talks about budget.
What does it cost?
We start from your number, not a package. Tell me what you want to invest, and I will walk you through what it buys and what it does not. If I can help, I will tell you. If I cannot, I will tell you that too, straight. Our fee is 1 flat monthly number in your proposal, always separate from ad spend so you can see what you are paying for.
Do you save what I type in here?
No. The math runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere unless you tap the text button, which opens a message you can edit or delete before sending.
Can I just text instead?
Yes. Text the question and I will answer it. No call, no charge. The call exists for the questions that need your numbers in front of both of us.
Now build the plan on your real numbers.
The calculator uses today’s blended rates. The audit splits them by channel, marks the leak, and turns the budget into a sequence.
